Celebrating Steampunk, the Old Updated for Today

The cabaret-circus hybrid Vau de Vire Society will perform Friday at the Josie Robertson Plaza.

Marco Sanchez

August 8, 2013

Weekend Miser

By A. C. LEE

Society once gave artists tacit license to shock the bourgeoisie, hoping that the artists would produce modern masterpieces.

These days, with our most prominent politicians, celebrities and athletes — to say nothing of the “real” housewives of various American cities — exploding the boundaries of social acceptability as forcefully as any poète maudit ever did, the Miser has trouble imagining a still-shockable bourgeoisie. The mainstream seems to have put the avant-garde out of business.

One novel response, Steampunk, has encouraged artists and thinkers to move forward by going back, resulting in a mash-up of Eisenhower-era sci-fi, Victorian arts and crafts, and Rube Goldberg-like invention updated for the digital age.

Gemini & Scorpio, a performance and party-promoting duo, pioneered and have been spreading the Steampunk aesthetic across the city over the past decade or so. On Friday night, the outfit will celebrate its 10th anniversary on a big public stage, kicking off its Steampunk Weekend with a night of free performances as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival.

The Josie Robertson Plaza in front of the Metropolitan Opera House will host the Vau de Vire Society, above, a cabaret-circus hybrid, followed by the cross-cultural, brass-fueled chaos of the Hungry March band. Around the corner, at the bandshell in Damrosch Park, you can catch Amanda Palmer & the Grand Theft Orchestra, along with the “pagan lounge ensemble” Rosin Coven.

The Battery Dance Company, a mainstay of Lower Manhattan’s arts culture since it first blossomed in the mid-1970s, hosts it annual Downtown Dance Festival, beginning Sunday afternoon on Battery Park’s Great Lawn. The festival’s 32nd iteration features the ensembles Chapter Two, from Athens; Vendetta Mathea & Company, based in southern France; and Dancing Earth, based in Santa Fe, N.M., and San Francisco. They will appear alongside the New York troupes SLK Ballet, Limón Dance Company and the Battery Dance Company itself. Admission is free, and the festival runs through Thursday.